In Praise of a Failed Mother
It’s difficult to describe my mother’s character. She could be good or bad, both or neither. Every state was equally true of her. Like the illnesses that bedeviled her, the shifting highs, lows, and inbetweens were tempestuous and unpredictable. Only recently have I realized there was a constant beneath the storm, so firm that I took it for granted, one that made all the difference: I never doubted that she loved me.
My Father’s Peculiar Funeral
That my father had died was not traumatic news. It was strange. Eight years later it still is. This is a first draft that took many drafts to write of how that relationship ended.
The rakish photo of him at right comes from a full page of the March 1967 Life Magazine. It was published three months before I was born. My mother saved a copy even after he left. The article about “Mr. Brain Drain” describes how this “restless 37-year-old American, … president of a New York firm called Careers Inc, which recruits personnel for big corporations,” was, in his words, “draining the English blind of their most promising talent.” He was a daring and cocksure entrepreneur (“I’ve never had to look for a job myself,” William Douglass explains.) Things went well until they didn’t. A few years later the restless man was bankrupt. Thirty-eight years later he was dead.
The Challenge of Hunger
My family recently undertook the Hunger Challenge posed by the local Arlington Food Assistance Center (AFAC). AFAC asked us to eat for $4.03 a day, the typical benefit allotted Virginians of limited means by the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Since the winter, my sons and I have volunteered with AFAC to pick up surplus produce from a local farmer’s market to supplement, along with milk, bread, meat, etc., what their clients can afford through SNAP.
SNAP is the modern version of the food stamp program. According to the the USDA FAQ it serves one out of eleven Americans each month, more than half of whom are children or the elderly. Most report income far below the poverty level. The average participant stays in the program for nine months.
Andrew Wells Douglass 